collaboration-software
(12)
IdeaScale Built a Suggestion Box for 4.5 Million People - Then Learned the Hard Part Starts After the Vote
The bootstrapped software company rode Washington's open-government wave into 25,000 organizations. Its sharper lesson came later: collecting ideas is easy; proving that one shipped is the business.
Nitesh Goel Built a Wall. Teachers Turned It Into a World.
A student project, a surprise bandwidth bill and one stubbornly simple idea became Padlet - the visual canvas now used by 40 million people around the world.
System Surveyor’s $50 Bet: Turn the Messy Security Site Walk Into a Living Map
Security projects used to shed context at every handoff - from yellow pad to PDF to spreadsheet to technician. System Surveyor built a visual record that follows the cameras, doors and decisions from first walk to final maintenance call.
The Startup Trying to Kill the Military's Most Dangerous Weapon: PowerPoint
A West Point officer watched treatment units get built where the virus had already left. He sketched the fix on a napkin. Six years later it is worth $2.15 billion.
You Can't Buy FigJam Without Buying Figma
Miro will sell a whiteboard to anyone for a few dollars and never mention the rest of its catalog. FigJam refuses to sell you anything unless you also buy a Figma seat. That one difference explains two very different companies.
Atlassian
Two Sydney graduates put $10,000 on credit cards in 2002 and built the software that runs the world's software teams. Today Atlassian's Jira, Confluence, and AI teammate Rovo power more than 300,000 companies - without ever relying on a traditional sales force.
Switchboard
Switchboard was a cloud coworking platform built for remote and hybrid teams. Instead of screen-sharing and tab-juggling, it put video and live, editable web apps - Google Docs, Figma, Jira, Trello and more - side by side in persistent virtual rooms, so a team could return to a project exactly where it left off. Founded in 2020 by serial entrepreneur Amir Ashkenazi, the company raised roughly $38 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Icon Ventures, Spark Capital and HubSpot Ventures, and held five patents. In late 2024 Ashkenazi wound down Switchboard and pivoted the company into Airtop, an AI web-agent and browser-automation platform.
Irene Chung
Irene Chung is a product builder and former startup founder who leads collaboration product work at Webflow, the visual web development platform. She co-founded and co-ran StellarEmploy, a data-driven recruiting tool for high-turnover hourly jobs that was later acquired by Learning Collider, then built collaboration and integrations products at Dropbox before joining Webflow. Trained with dual graduate degrees from the Harvard Kennedy School and MIT Sloan, she describes herself as a builder focused on how people use technology to think and work together.
Clearstory
Clearstory is a cloud-based change order communication platform for commercial construction. It gives general contractors, specialty contractors and project owners a shared, real-time system to create, price, track and align on change orders and time-and-material (T&M) tags - the extra work that traditionally gets buried in email, PDFs and spreadsheets. Founded in 2018 as Extracker and rebranded to Clearstory in 2023, the company runs a business network where contractors exchange roughly $1B in change orders every month, and counts many of North America's largest general contractors as customers.
Mio
Mio is an Austin, Texas company that makes enterprise chat platforms talk to each other. Instead of forcing a whole organization onto a single tool, Mio sits in the middle and federates the public APIs of Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Chat, Zoom Team Chat and Cisco Webex so a message typed in one app lands natively in another. Founded in 2015 by Tom Hadfield and James Cundle and backed by Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Zoom and Cisco, Mio turns the messy reality of multi-platform companies (and the partners they work with) into a single, interoperable conversation.
Thomas Scott
Thomas Scott is the Chief Executive Officer of Wrike, the enterprise work management platform headquartered in San Diego. A self-described total company leader who arrived as CFO in 2022, he took the interim seat in July 2023 after Symphony Technology Group acquired the business, and was made permanent CEO in February 2024. His mandate: steady the ship after three ownership changes, push AI deeper into the product, and turn Wrike into a multi-product platform.
Justin Rosenstein
Justin Rosenstein is the co-founder of Asana and creator of some of the internet's most influential features - including the Facebook Like button and Gmail Chat. A Stanford mathematics graduate who dropped out of grad school at 20 to join Google, he went on to shape how billions communicate and collaborate online. Now he's wrestling with the consequences of his creations, starring in Netflix's The Social Dilemma and founding One Project, a nonprofit reimagining governance and economics. He lives in Agape, a cooperative house in San Francisco's Mission District founded on unconditional love, and has banned himself from the very technologies he helped build.